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Wow … 😯 it has been a year since the last time I posted on this blog. As I mentioned in my introduction post, I am not the kind of person to focus on one thing for the full 100%. I have a couple of things I’m passionate about in life, but I’m not able nor willing to give one up. In a perfect world I would be the best and most productive photographer on the planet. At the same time I also would be a guitarlegend, the best in my job as a psychologist, the best father on the globe, a great athlete and a perfect husband. Unfortunately the world isn’t perfect and in real life i’m none of all that. I try my best not to suck at any of it though, and I hope I’m succeeding in just that.

Usually there is one passion that has the upper hand in my life and often it stays dominant for a while, ranging from months to even years sometimes. But eventually I tend to shift focus between the passions in my life, never fully abandoning any of them. As I mentioned before, at the time our first child was born I got into photography and it kept me busy for a couple of years. I started this blog to keep it alive … but this past year I reconnected with an old love, my guitar. I really enjoy playing it again on a regular basis, and I finally got that amp that I had been dreaming of for years. But in the meanwhile this blog got neglected a bit, no photography projects that I felt were worth sharing here. But here I am again, posting for you all to read, letting you all know I’m still around. I hope to be able to come around more often, but we will see. I see way to many people struggling and suffering under the pressure of trying to juggle way to many things at a time. I’m not the best juggler, but then again, it is not my ambition to be a juggler.

So, at last some visuals. Here’s our youngest, enjoying some nice weather finally (winter just kept coming at us this year). I still try to document our everyday life and preserve some precious memories in doing so. I choose this shot to share because, to me, it has that summer feel all over it and I’m longing for that summer to come. I hope we get lots of it, and I wish you all the same.

Sssoooww, time flies they say!! No, I did not die since that last post for those wondering. Basically I got caught up in everyday life the last few months and my photography got banned to the second (or third) plan because of that. I didn’t even finish the photography-course I was attending (the one about portraiture I mentioned in this post). Although I really enjoyed the actual saturday morning classes I found myself having a difficult time in investing time and energy in the additional assignments. They just weren’t very high on my priority list and eventually I threw in the towel. It wasn’t an easy decision but I must admit it felt somewhat liberating in the end. Now I can shoot because I want to instead of shooting because I have to. Although I didn’t finish the course, I did attend most of the classes and learned a lot. The opportunity to work and experiment with all the fancy studio-equipment was an absolute blast.

Today I wanted to share two portraits of Eric, one of my fellow students. In one of the classes we had to exercise in balancing flash exposure with the existing ambient light. For the first shot above we found a spot inside the KISP-building where I could use a giant window as a backdrop. Outside that window was an industrial kind of landscape bathing in gorgeous morning light. By under-exposing the background and lighting Eric (studio-strobe + softbox) separatly we ended up with this.

For this next shot we faced the cold (it was freezing) and headed outside. It was a rather sunny morning so we had to move into the shade to avoid the harsh shadows that the sun would have given us. We used the sunny field behind Eric as a backdrop (again somewhat under-exposed) and mimicked sunlight falling on him using a speedlight with shoot-through umbrella for softer light-quality. This way we could keep the contrast under control, but still achieve very natural looking light.

That’s it for today’s comeback-post!! I hope you have enjoyed it and hopefully I will be able to post on a more regular base again, so stay tuned and see you all later.

Hello there!! The last few weeks have been pretty busy and I haven’t found much time to cultivate my online presence (sounds fancy, no? :-D). Because it has been a while since my last post I figured it was time to share some imagery again. Well, just one image actually.

Some posts ago I mentioned my photography-training being all about portraiture for the moment, and the above shot was taken for the sake of an assignment we got. We had to shoot indoors, with only a window as a lightsource, and produce a series of images with various lighting (as in frontal, sideways and backlit).

My lovely wife helped me out on this one by being a very patient model. Muchas gracias to you mylady!! She is a very creative person herself actually, making her way into the scrapbooking/cardmaking world out there. She has been sharing her creations on her own blog for over two years now and not without succes. She recently got selected as designteam-member for two different, rather important companies in the bussiness. Me proud!! The pictures on her blog, of course, are all done by yours truly. Hope I can contribute a little bit by doing so.

Like this:

On the about-page I wrote about how I got interested in photography a couple of years ago, which was because we, my wife and I, became parents. Like many other parents we wanted to document all those beautiful moments with our kids, as time seems to fly by so quickly. A decent camera seemed the way to go, I got hooked to photography in general, and here we are now…

As I’m writing this post we are 3 years down the road already. Nora just started school again, as did her father this very morning. I started another module of the photography-training at KISP today and it surely looks very promising as it will be all about portraiture (in studio and on location). Portraits seem to attract me more than anything else in photography so I’m psyched to learn more about it and hopefully I’ll become a better “people-shooter” in the end.

So portraits and my kids… As you can imagine I tend to shoot my kids quite a lot, but with mixed results (so I have a lot to learn clearly). However, sometimes it just all lines up, and usually I know it/feel it the moment the shutter goes ‘click’. For todays post I thought I’d share two of these pictures that I feel very good about. The models, of course, are the little ones that started all this.

The first picture is Nora about a year ago, the next is Tuur only two months ago. For those interested, the lens used in both these shots was the nikon 50mm AF-S 1.4. God, I love that lens!

Like this:

After some thinking about what would be my first proper post on this brand new blog I figured that people who venture out on the world-wide-web searching for the holy grail of photography might be more into visuals than into text (duh!!). While you can read a bit of background info about me on the about-page, here’s the visual introduction by means of a self-portrait (well, kind of …).

This picture was taken at the photography museum in Charleroi ( Musée de la Photographie). It kinda reflects who I am in a way, being into all kinds of stuff which is cool. But it comes with a downside too. Being unable to choose means being unable to focus for 100% on one thing, at least not for a longer period of time. But hey, I’m still okay with it.